Business and management

Filthy lucre

The case for money laundering

AMONG the staples of journalists’ in-boxes are surveys whose results bolster the business case of the company paying for them. Most of these can be safely ignored. Regardless of income, “UK shoppers now seek out the very best prices”, reports a company that arranges consumer rebates and promotions. This is unlikely to command space in the business pages ofThe Economist.

An especially piquant example of the genre does merit some mention. This is the revelation that “despite believing handling cash, bank notes or coins to be unhygienic and dirty, only one in five wash their hands after holding it.” This bombshell comes from a survey of 9,000 people in 12 European countries commission by MasterCard, a big payments processing company.

MasterCard does not hide its purpose: to scare people into using germ-free “contactless” payments in preference to cash. The press release quotes the chief of the European contactless business as lamenting that, though they know cash is unclean, “Europeans are struggling to break the bad habit of spending it.” Hungarians are especially reprehensible: 84% believe cash is dirty but just 26% always wash their hands after using it, a “say-do gap” of 58%. The French are only slightly less irresponsible, with a say-do gap of 55%.

Like a horror-movie auteur, MasterCard is building the dread slowly. Last year it and Oxford University disclosed thatthe average European bank note contains 26,000 colonies of bacteria. Thegrime on old notes is mainly made up of sebum (an oily secretion found on skin and in earwax), a biologist reports.Yet unsuspecting consumers are more likely to wash their hands after touching an animal or riding the Underground. The reason, says a psychologist, is that whereas people realise that money is germy they “do not connect disease or illness to the handling of money.”

But then neither do the folks at MasterCard. The best they can do is report that bacteria that cause gastroenteritis and other “unwanted diseases” have been found on cash. Spending money may be encouraging the spread of antibiotic-resistant bugs, warns the biologist. But then he breaks the spell by saying people should treat cash with the same caution they reserve for such high-risk activities as handling communal food and holding escalator rails.

A more disinterested survey would probably report that Europeans, far from struggling to break the habit of spending cash, would like to get their hands on more of it. Still, MasterCard has performed a service. We now know that expressions like “filthy lucre” and “dirty money” are true literally as well as metaphorically. “Ill-gotten gains” could be tweaked into “illness-begetting gains”. Contactless payments are one possible answer. Another might be money laundering.

Perhaps the survey chose to overlook the elephant in the room - that cash is largely untraceable to the transactor (unless you are dealing with cash coming from a bank heist whose serial numbers have been communicated to the police).
This 'anonymity' is a facility the world chooses to avail, with the knowledge that
i) electronic transactions can be, and are monitored, by Western intelligence agencies, who can use that information to suit their own agenda
ii) all electronic finance processes operate in a monopolistic word - there are no credible alternatives to Visa, Paypal, Western Union, SWIFT - the payment systems that form the backbone of global electronic finance ; all have their servers and HQ-s located in America, and behave according to the diktats of the American establishment - - like arbitrary freezing of assets of those who 'disagree with the West', as Paypal did to Assange.

I would like to see The Economist publish an analysis of the mechanism of 'Hawala' - the de-facto transaction mechanism of the world, and its underlying motivations.

If I do recall my high school microbiology class, the concentration of heavy metals in coins has a mild anti-microbial effect. This doesn't mean that coins are sterile. It just means that microorganisms have a difficult time propagating on or in close proximity to coins. I think that any public concern over the cleanliness of coins is overblown.